Monday, July 14, 2008

Housekeeping

by Dani

We are both on leave from work this week, but not going away until the weekend, so we’ve got a bit more breathing space than usual.

We all went to town on Saturday, on a quest for Pearlie’s next book group book.One of the last remaining independent bookshops in town came up trumps in the end, after the library, Borders, Waterstones, WH Smiths and Sussex Stationers had all failed.

We ended up doing a lot of walking, encountering massed choirs outside the library, registering our protest at their decision to apply age ranges to their children’s fiction shelves, and acquiring books, computer games, and watermelons on the way.

We were thrilled to discover Leo’s story on display in the window of Waterstones, as one of the local winners of their What’s Your Story competition.If you’re local, do go and have a look – I think there are several other young authors from Little Green Pig featured there as well.

The book group is meeting here tonight, so we spent most of yesterday tidying and cleaning in the children’s bedrooms.Leo’s room in particular had reached bombsite proportions, but is now lovely and tidy, if somewhat overstocked.We bit the bullet and passed on a few old picture books to the family next door, who have a 6 month old baby.Some of the best picture books we had when P and L were little were donations from our neighbours on the other side, so it’s lovely to be able to maintain a tradition there.We also pulled out a bag full of dressing up clothes to donate to our favourite crèche (if they want them).

Allie and I have ruthlessly weeded our clothes in preparation for buying some that are not grey.I now have no t-shirts, but at least there is room in the chest of drawers.

As you may have noticed, we’ve done a bit of tidying up here as well – just fancied a change, really.We think it looks quite clean and fresh now, but we may continue to fiddle around with it – any requests or comments, just let us know!

Other things that have happened include:

The kids and I went on a butterfly spotting walk in and around one of our local parks yesterday.We met David Bellamy at the end, as it was part of a city wide initiative to involve local people in a biodiversity survey of butterflies, and he was helping to promote it.The kids, of course, had no idea who he was, but I think they enjoyed the event.

Duck Rock are busy working on a new song, and Pearlie has written some lyrics with minimal support from Allie.

Leo has been working in a very focused way through the levels of various games on the CBBC website.At first he seemed to find this a very frustrating process, and there was lots of cursing and complaining when things didn’t go his way in the game.But he seems now to have settled into a “try, try again” kind of mindset, and is having quite a lot of success.

I helped on the rota at Kids Club on Thursday, and was privileged to witness the whole group cooperating together in a game of crossing a space without letting their feet touch the ground (using some old carpet squares as stepping stones)